


The Pride of House Velaryon

by Essie_Cat



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: Arranged Marriage, Body Image, Book: Fire and Blood, Canon-Typical Homophobia, Canon-Typical Sexism, Consensual Infidelity, F/M, M/M, Weight Issues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-23
Updated: 2020-09-23
Packaged: 2021-03-08 04:42:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,388
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26619907
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Essie_Cat/pseuds/Essie_Cat
Summary: Laenor ignores the bawdy men in his wife’s bed. Rhaenyra ignores the pretty men in his. But he loves his dark-haired sons and indulges his spoiled princess, and she finds a strange respect for the husband she expected to loathe.
Relationships: Daemon Targaryen/Rhaenyra Targaryen, Harwin Strong/Rhaenyra Targaryen, Joffrey Lonmouth/Laenor Velaryon, Rhaenyra Targaryen & Laenor Velaryon
Comments: 4
Kudos: 41





	The Pride of House Velaryon

**Author's Note:**

> I’ve been listening to Fire and Blood for the fiftieth time and I'm obsessed all over again. So I'm inflicting some of my headcanons upon the internet, for anyone who finds Rhaenyra and Laenor as interesting as I do (which might be literally no one? But if you're out there and you exist - hello!)

Rhaenyra was no stranger to flattery.

As a girl, the Seven Kingdoms had praised her in a way it is easy to praise children. The Realm’s Delight was otherworldly in her silver-haired, purple-eyed beauty, just as the common folk yearned for their dragonlords to be.

Once she bled, her beauty and her body were a threat. Men whispered of the princess and her sworn shield, of the princess and her uncle, of the princess with her mouth around the cock of any man who smiled at her. In the taverns they denounced her as a whore, but to her face they would assert how good and kind she was, how wonderfully she flew and danced, how to gaze upon Rhaenyra Targaryen was to suffer the radiance of the sun itself. 

When, at seven-and-ten, she was instructed to marry a man who would sooner eat rotting flesh than put a child in her, there seemed no crueller fate.

‘You look wonderful,’ her future husband told her, sitting at her side at Dragonstone. An honoured guest in her hall, at her father’s command. 

Laenor, with his Velaryon father and Targaryen mother, boasted the silver-white hair and purple eyes of the proudest Valyrians. He was the prettiest man she had ever seen, a fine silver boy on a fine grey dragon, as well she told everyone who would listen. From her sharp tongue, none could mistake it for a compliment.

‘Your dress…’ His pale eyebrows rose, white teeth shone in a winning smile. ‘That lace is exquisite. Myrish?’ 

She frowned at him, caught between derision and amusement. Was he truly so shameless? He made no attempt to hide it. Every lord and lady in the Seven Kingdoms knew what Laenor Velaryon was, knew where his interests lay, and yet there he sat, bold as dragonflame, flaunting his strangeness before her. 

She imagined Daemon, in all his fierce, dark passion, commenting on the fabric of her dress rather than the curve of her hip or the swell of her breast underneath it, and she could not hold back a smirk.

‘I amuse you?’ Laenor asked mildly. ‘I am glad. Perhaps I shall be of some use to you after all.’

She shot him a sharp look. Was he mocking her, rubbing the indignity of their union in her face? She delayed, taking a sip from her goblet, considering upturning the rest of it over his pretty silver head. 

She swirled the wine, dark as blood, watching as it rippled. ‘You are hardly reputed as a great wit, cousin.’

‘Perhaps not,’ he agreed. ‘But perhaps, with another few choice compliments, I might be rewarded with a laugh.’

He was still smiling his easy smile, and she felt fury rising in her at the unfairness of it all. How dare he grin and jape with her when all she wanted to do was weep at the fate they must share – to sob and scream and tear her garments as if she were some weak maid rather than the Princess of Dragonstone. 

‘If you wish to play the fucking fool, you may prance and sing with Mushroom,’ she snapped, and signalled to her cupbearer. 

Later that evening, lips and teeth stained red from Dornish strongwine, she told him, imperious and shrill, that she expected everything from him when they were wed. They were to be bound together for eternity before the eyes of gods and men, and she would not allow him to embarrass her.

‘All I have will be yours,’ he said carefully, and even in the haze of wine she knew he did not mean it. ‘Whatever you want, I will give it.’ 

‘Not you,’ she spat, petulant as a child. She thought of Ser Criston who had cared for her so ardently, of her Uncle Daemon’s wicked flirtations, of Harwin Strong and the Lannister twins, the Lords Bracken and Blackwood, the dozens of others who had vied for her hand and lost it. ‘I do not want _you.’_

He laughed, the sound strange and full and desperate. ‘I know, princess.’ He met her gaze and quirked an eyebrow skywards. ‘In truth, I do not want you either.’

She was prepared to snarl at him, to banish him from her hall and send him quivering back to Driftmark. But she found the corners of her mouth twitching, a smile sneaking in, a snort of something like mirth in her throat. She consented to laugh until she felt she might cry for real, and only Arbor gold could relieve her. 

*

‘Joffrey,’ Laenor suggested, utterly in earnest and ever so foolish, when she presented him with their first son. 

She was unrepentant as she did so. Let him say what he would, she had the outrage ready to wield, the words ready to spit back at him or at any of them. She had already shrieked at the septa who had looked between her and the child and raised an eyebrow. She would have the woman thrashed and thrown to the streets like a whore, protected by the Faith or no.

But Laenor held the babe with something close to reverence, carefully stroking at the child’s splash of dark hair. 

‘Joffrey?’ she repeated, thrown by his suggestion, by his quiet acceptance. ‘For your – companion? The knight who fell at the tourney?’ 

‘He was a good man,’ he said, not looking at her, purple eyes still fixed on the child in his arms, wide brown eyes gazing back at him. 

‘Our son needs a name of Old Valyria,’ was all Rhaenyra said. 

She shifted her position in the bed, wincing, her body wrecked, heavy and slow. The thick pouch of her belly slumped out before her; she ran her fingers along the crest of it with a twinge of discomfort. She had seen her stepmother swell with each of her pregnancies and return each time to the willowy figure that had won her the king in her youth. No doubt her body would reward her just the same.

‘What do you think of him?’ she asked, as her son gurgled in Laenor’s arms. ‘He is magnificent, is he not?’ 

‘He is a miracle,’ her husband said, as if it were the plainest truth in the world. He met her brazen gaze. ‘He has your mother’s look. The Arryn blood was strong in her as well as the Targaryen.’ 

She thought this a good line, so good that she later shared it with her father. The old king wept at it, agreeing that the child was so like his beloved Aemma and the dark-haired Arryns that came before her. Declaring that, one day, Jacaerys Velaryon would make the finest king that Westeros had ever known.

*

As their second son fought his way into the world, Laenor stood across the room, worrying at his lip with his teeth, arms wrapped around his slim torso. She spared a moment to wonder whether her cunt frightened him like this, even now, demonstrably occupied with other matters. 

Harwin stood by her bed. He was the one to squeeze her hand as she screamed, to buffer against her rage when she hurled it out into the chamber. She was so accustomed to his quiet, stalwart presence, his huge, thick hands upon her, and it soothed her a little as she pushed and shrieked and cursed. 

But when the child emerged, red-faced and bawling and dark-haired as his brother, Laenor was the first to hold him.

‘He’s beautiful,’ he said, his whisper like a prayer. ‘Here, ser.’ He showed Harwin the boy, all earnest excitement to the knight’s gruff silence. ‘Wonderful, is he not?’

As the maester fussed over the newborn and Harwin stood stoic, his role fulfilled, Laenor crouched by the bed. 

‘You did so well,’ he told Rhaenyra softly, pressing his lips to her temple, as she struggled to contain her tears. ‘He’s perfect. You are perfect.’

‘He looks like Jace,’ she choked out, barely sure of where the words were coming from or of what she wanted them to mean.

‘Yes, my princess,’ her husband said, brushing a lock of sweat-soaked hair from her face. ‘He does.’

*

When the third of her dark-haired sons was born, she granted Laenor what he desired.

‘What was he like?’ she found herself asking. At the time, in the aftermath of her wedding, she had been too consumed by anger at her husband and her father and the Seven and all the world. She had scarce spared a thought for the man that Ser Criston had felled with his morningstar, the one they called the Knight of Kisses. 

In the aftermath of their wedding, Laenor had wept six days and nights as his friend lay dying, as tongues wagged about Ser Laenor and his fallen knight, about Princess Rhaenyra’s empty marriage bed, as if there were anything new to be said on the matter.

‘Ser Joffrey,’ she said, as Laenor looked at her, searching. ‘Come, tell me of him, this man who shares my son’s name.’

Eventually, he said, ‘He was a good fellow. A true knight. Witty, wry. Cleverer than he looked. I think he would have charmed you, my princess. You would have enjoyed his stories, and his smile.’

‘I remember him a little,’ she said vaguely, which was not untrue. ‘He had rather fine eyes.’

As the words fell out, careless as feathers on the breeze, she realised how cruel they sounded. But Laenor was used to her by now; he could tell when her cruelty was intentional. 

With a small, sad smile, her husband said, ‘As to that, I really cannot say.’

*

Men still sang flattery to Rhaenyra Targaryen, for she was a king’s daughter who would one day be a queen. But neither their honeyed words nor her expensive satins could disguise that the Realm’s Delight was fading, puffy-faced with a stubborn pouch of fat at her waist and ragged silver lines across her belly. 

She screeched at her ladies when they brought gowns that didn’t fit, at the seamstresses who measured her for new ones, and cursed them from her sight as the fools and ingrates they were.

‘Come now,’ Laenor said, lounging on the bed they did not share, ‘why worry yourself with such matters?’

Why _worry?_ How would he feel if his famed beauty – silver and shining as it was – had drained away by only one-and-twenty? She was reminded of it every day, inescapable. The uncomfortable weight on her once lissome form, rounding out her body in ways she refused to accept. The unfamiliar space she occupied in seats and saddles and clothes. The humiliating envy she felt when she glanced upon unmarried maids, or mothers who scarcely looked to have carried a child, and she was reminded of what she had lost. 

‘If you mean to mock me,’ she snapped at him, ‘return to the chambers we have prepared for you.’ 

But then his hands were on her, brushing gently over her shoulders. She closed her eyes a moment. She was a woman who yearned to be touched and found plenty willing to indulge her. Once, men would have gouged out their own eyes for the merest chance of it.

Against her bitterness, her husband said, ‘You are the most beautiful woman in all Westeros, princess. No man could deny it.’

Harwin never had such sweet words for her, but then, he was not that sort of man. Breakbones was all passion and might, strong enough to pick her up and throw her down when that was what she wanted, for all the extra weight on her these days. Strong enough to groan and writhe beneath her when that was what she wanted, too.

But words are wind. Daemon had said such things often in days past, when they had been easy, careless truths. She thought of Daemon, of the look on Daemon’s face when he had seen her last. The curl of his lip as his eyes raked her up and down. His manner had fallen into an obsequiousness she had never noticed before, and it was more mocking than his wicked flattery had ever been. She thought of Daemon’s strong, calloused hands circling his wife’s little waist, of all the women he had touched with those hands because the king would not let him have _her._

Yet Laenor was another sort of man entirely. Despite it all, she granted him a small smile, and his face brightened to know he had pleased her.

‘Only in Westeros?’ she asked, raising an eyebrow. 

‘And in Essos, no doubt,’ he amended. ‘Men would sing your praises all the way to Asshai by the Shadow, if they had but one glimpse of you.’

Her lips quirked. ‘Then I charge you, husband, take Seasmoke this very night and spread word of it. Tell the men of Asshai what they are missing.’

‘When our sons’ dragons are grown, we shall all fly out together,’ he declared, ‘til men as far as Yi Ti sing the praises of Rhaenyra the Dragon Queen, beautiful and wise and bold. Four messengers are better than one.’ 

She pouted a little to make a point, for his eyes were still on her, gentle and amused. ‘There is still the issue of the fucking gown, the one my fat arse will not squeeze into.’

He raised an eyebrow. ‘It seems to me that the gown is at fault, princess, not you. You will have more gowns made, each one finer than the last. You could step into your hall in your nightclothes and men would crow it was the finest silk they had ever seen.’

Laenor’s hands, slim and pale and soft, skimmed over her shoulders and down her arms. An innocent touch, almost fatherly. He leaned in to kiss her cheek. She held her breath, inhaling the gentle spice of his perfume, somewhat surprised, as always, by the chastity of his lips on her skin.

‘I will dress,’ she conceded, ‘and we shall go to dinner. It would not do to keep them waiting.’

He beamed at her, all shining white teeth and laughing purple eyes. The only man in Westeros, sometimes, who had the power to make her smile, for all other men could make her curse and gasp and scream. ‘They will wait for you, my princess. Of that I am sure.’


End file.
